Plex Asks GitHub to Take Down 'Reshare' Repository over Piracy Fears
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Can someone in the US please ask for DMCA takedowns against all of Microsoft's repositories? I've seen plenty of people using Microsoft products to "grow" piracy. Including github itself.
But... As a (self-proclaimed) world-renowned pirate of all the media. A not insignificant part of my downloads come from OneDrive or Google Drive links. With MEGA in a close 3rd. Everything is else is torrents.
Only when the “copy” function is removed from windows will copyright holders be able to rest safe.
And Windows is most pirated OS.
In that case, I wonder if they’re trying to claim API copyright or if there’s something more substantial behind it. There’s also the trademark matter and IANAL, but I don’t think that’d go through DMCA requests?
XBMC forks, becomes Plex
Plex devs decide to charge membership. Requires a payment processor.
Payment processors get very twitchy around anything that could involve piracy
So Plex take an aggressive anti-piracy stance, despite it being the primary use case for their software. In this case an unauthorised use takedown.
It would appear Plex are claiming there was 'Plex Server' in the repo.
I wish there was simply a way to make it show me the files I have available, for instance. There seems to be no way to do that. Instead, it insists on auto-detecting everything and then showing some preview image for that, along with some info scraped from the internet somewhere. It sounds nice, but instead when I want to watch "Space: 1999", it tells me I only have episodes of "Space Jam" or some other show I've never heard of. Or, it tells me I have no shows at all, but the shows are instead in the "Movies" section, or somewhere else entirely in the UI. It's bizarre.
I can see why a lot of people would get frustrated with it.
The Plex UI is better but only a little bit better. On the other hand they are really REALLY irritating with re-enabling their online adverts. Every time you upgrade its comes back again. Or your actual content ends up deep in a menu but the online nonsense is always there. Also you end up having to create a plex account to access your stuff and I don't know how much information they are tracking.
I just got tired of having to re-set it up all the time. Jellyfin seems much better so far, but its still early days for me.
I haven't had any trouble at all with the server side though (Linux).
This is what I want most of the time too, so I love Kodi (media scanning/detection disabled. direct play from a share on my LAN).
We installed Jellyfin recently and noticed an option in Dashboard - Libraries -Display - "Display a folder view to show plain media folders". Haven't tested that fully yet.
Plex friends inform me it can't do a folders/files view at all :(
By that metric github should be taken down.
I am so sick of the policing of copying of data masquerading as "intellectual property" or "rights". These terms are so insidious: to be against "property" makes it sound like some bizarre fringe view, and to scoff at the "intellectual" kind makes it sound like you don't care about other people's thoughts (when obviously the opposite is true).
It's so completely obvious that these systems of control can't survive an environment of low-friction copy and transit of data. We're on the cusp, as a species, of finally shucking off this nonsense and enshrining the traditions of free copying and remixing and collaboration.
...so what's the point of continuing the pretense? Who is winning here? The banks whose logos paint the skyline of West Nashville? (I'm in East Nashville as I write this).
All it's going to take is one sovereign jurisdiction refusing to play along, and then everyone will just use internet services in that jurisdiction.
It seems like a house of cards that is going to fall very quickly.
Are we ready for that?
Between BitTorrent and Cloudflare R2, one could distribute a file to everyone connected to the Internet for a pittance. For digital files, there is no scarcity of the files themselves. Creating the files is a different matter, but the distribution of digital data on a planetary scale is so doable it's silly we're getting in our own way with this artificial system. Creators need to be compensated, absolutely, but DRM making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.
I'm working full-time on this issue, just in the context of my own music project. Stay tuned!
You'll hear them soon. You can hear my last record here: https://justinholmes.com/music/vowel-sounds/
I'm working full-time on this issue, with zero success thus far. When I do finally succeed, I'ma get filthy rich sellin' "Dehydrated Water" (Just Add Water).
Can't stop the signal
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If I understand it correctly, this software allows you to bypass some Plex sharing permissions by allowing you to re-share other people's libraries.
While this can be seen as DMCA abuse by Plex, I personally think it's partially justified (it probably goes against the TOS), and no "regular" user would need it.
It's not a surprise, since they are constantly at "war" against people who use their software to do illegal business. Since their software is relatively polished and well-supported across multiple platforms, some use it to build Netflix clones with illegal content. The repository referenced by the article is probably a helpful tool for such actors.